While such compassion is active and immediate,
In the moment of compassion, its essential emptiness is nakedly clear.
This conjunction is the unfailing supreme path;
Inseparable from it, may I practice day and night.
Commentary
Is compassion real then?
The old tendencies die hard, don’t they? We want something, anything, to hold onto.
There are two kinds of compassion. The first is compassion that is an emotion, a higher emotion, granted, but an emotion just the same. Like any other emotion, it is impermanent and dependent on conditions. In particular, it is subject to decay into despair and susceptible to being corrupted into control.
Then there is compassion as a quality of awareness, a quality of mind nature. It is just there, but when you look at what it is, you see nothing. You just experience naked clarity, but there is nothing there, nothing at all. Yet, when you move, every gesture, in thought, word, or deed, expresses compassion.
When you know the utter emptiness, the utter groundlessness, of all
experience, you know there is nothing to grasp, nothing to hold, and nothing to
fear. Yet people suffer in their lives. Compassion shines forth as the natural
expression of the groundlessness of life.
Compassion and emptiness. Emptiness and compassion. One without the other is like a bird with one wing. In emptiness, we touch the nature of experience. In compassion, we touch the struggles and sufferings of the world. When we stay in touch with both, we do not fall into either the extreme of peace or the extreme of existence. We are present, in our own lives and in the world.